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An anonymous reader writes "According to Sophos, Facebook users are getting sloppier with their personal info, not better. Revisiting a 2007 survey in which a plastic frog got 87 hits out of 200 friend requests, this time a rubber duck and a cat got 87 out of 200 friend requests, plus a bonus 8 friends who decided to trust them anyway. The research also suggests that older Facebook users are sloppier than the young, being keener to build their list of friends. (The older users had more than 4x the friends each, on average, than the young.)"

I'm thinking that a lot of people add folks they don't know into their friends' pile for the applications, esp. games. After all, Mafia Wars and the like are rigged to get you more in-game "power" (more defense, offense, etc) with the larger number of friends you add (and then subsequently add into your "Mafia", or "Neighbors", or "Crew").

I assigned all of my "game friends" into their own group and then used Facebooks group security to limit the personal information that they can see. It took all of five minutes to setup. Someone in that group can see as much information about me as someone who isn't my friend at all, which is to say not much.

Now I'll accept every friend request that comes my way. If I don't recognize the name and the friend doesn't leave a note saying how they know me then I push them into the game friend group. Problem solved.

I assigned all of my "game friends" into their own group and then used Facebooks group security to limit the personal information that they can see.

Does that actually work at the moment? A few months ago myself and a friend had a play with those features and no matter what settings he used I kept being able to see everything I could before we started. Admittedly we didn't report the issues nor have we bothered re-testing (so maybe our experience is just a fluke or a temporary issue at the time).

Pretty cool idea, personally, I really don't restrict what information I show, but to be honest, always click ignore application on the friend requests for apps... I only see a small number of them anymore.

Keep in mind that the game itself still has access to all of your information. The Facebook terms of service prohibits the game from using or storing that information for anything not game-related, but there's nothing other than the honor system and Facebook's vague threats to occasionally enforce the rules that prevents it from doing so. The API itself will happily grant access to everything, whether the game needs it or not.

Your best bet, if you must play FB games, is to maintain an entirely separate profile just for that purpose, and put nothing personally identifiable on it.

I personally think the information available to a game should be more restricted and better policed.

Lately I have noticed applications asking for information they didn’t feasibly need, plus asking for the ability to post stories on my wall without prompting me each time. If you don’t give them the permissions they ask for, they ask again until you give permission (or uninstall the app).

I don’t install many applications, but it pisses me off when applications pull this sort of crap. I don

Isn't that what everyone dose? I need lots of freinds to "help" me play whichever game I am into at the moment. Other people do too. I just assume that when someone I don't know and have no connection to, adds me, it's because they need help with some game or other.

If that person drops me a polite note with the application invite, I usually help out.

I also became friends (The kind you break bread with if you are ever in the same town) with several people I met throgh FB games.

That's a trust by default rule. You're relying on Facebook to get the security right, or just to be sure that you keep up with any changes they make to their security model. If I don't know somebody, then they don't get to be on my friend list. And if an app needs access to my personal information, then I block it too. This Mafia thing looks like fun, but the expense is too high.

Except Facebook apps are harvesting all your personal info and anyone who is your friend, whether they have added the application or not. It's the reason my Application Block List is so long, and I'm not even sure that works to block everything.

Good. Let Facebook go the way of the dodo. It's the equivalent of those "personal home pages" people put up when they first discovered the Web.

I wouldn't say it's equivalent but they do share a little bit of similarity. Facebook, unlike personal home pages, is far more intuitive now than "p.h.p."'s where back in the day. Perhaps it's wider exposure to all things web, or perhaps it's better web technologies and tech. adoption (CSS + JS frameworks + "AJAX").

And the biggest difference, I'd say as both a web developer, a Facebook member, and someone who doesn't really like Facebook, I certainly do appreciate it for the easy as which I found I was ab

Except you couldn't reconnect with old friends whom you haven't seen for years using personal home pages. And you couldn't share events with your friends and have it automatically send them an email message using personal home pages. And you couldn't have a quick chat with an old friend in another state using personal home pages.

Except you couldn't reconnect with old friends whom you haven't seen for years using personal home pages.

Really? Let me introduce you to http://www.google.com/ [google.com] and as far as chatting goes, when you email your old pal you say "Hey, are you on AOL instant messenger or MSN Live Messenger or ICQ or Yahoo Messenger or . . . my screen name is foo. Please IM Me I would love to chat. Or better yet, let's be actual humans and talk. my number is 555-555-5555. Call me!"

When you are in a band and want to let everyone who is a fan of yours what is going on, sometimes "talking like an actual humans" is a little unrealistic. So is trying to personally email or IM everyone - some who you actually don't really know, but still want to come out to your shows. Facebook is very convenient for that.

You're being ridiculous. In no way does Google provide the same ability to reconnect to old friends. Before social networking, most people did not have an internet presence. The vast majority of my friends who are on facebook have no other internet presence, and a google search would reveal only their facebook profile.

And if you're hosting an event, you don't want to have to enter 50 numbers in a text message in order to invite people whose participation is only marginally necessary. It's also nice b

Seriously, have you actaully ever used facebook? Probably half the people I've reconnected with are people I would never have found through online search. Google search won't reveal networks of mutual friends, but it's how a lot of facebook friends find each other.

Or better yet, let's be actual humans and talk. my number is 555-555-5555. Call me!"

Am I the only one who finds statements like this funny? Holding up "talking on the telephone" as being "actual human", but writing off instant messengers as if it's in some way inferior?

Don't get me wrong, different forms of communications have their place, but the idea that hearing someone's voice is inherently superior to reading what someone writes makes me imagine luddites in the time when telephones were just becoming wide-spread saying something like "Let's be actual humans and talk face-to-face. Dir

Actually it's "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years." -- Mark Twain

Well, this is based on a completely unscientific poll of my brain cells, but it seems older users would be more likely to, at least initially, treat sites like Facebook as something new to just try out, a fun toy more than a serious part of their lives, and thus less likely to care that much about how they expose themselves on such a site.

Well, this is based on a completely unscientific poll of my brain cells, but it seems older users would be more likely to, at least initially, treat sites like Facebook as something new to just try out, a fun toy more than a serious part of their lives, and thus less likely to care that much about how they expose themselves on such a site.

Old people exposing themselves on facebook seems like a far larger problem than than this article speaks of.

The older users had more than 4x the friends each, on average, than the young.

It's like older users know more people than younger users, and that's just not possible. Kids know everything, just ask them.

More to the point, I don't see why this is an issue. I don't store anything on Facebook that's private and I don't trust any links that anyone that I don't know personally shares with me (not to mention my use of noscript's XSS-busting features). So what do I have to lose in accepting a friend request from a plastic frog, exactly?

I use Facebook to let members of the forum [mosaicands...dglass.org] know if there's a server problem. Most of my 50 or so friends are from the forum with my Facebook Forum page at something over 100 fans. I set up a filter so I can filter out the forum members and get updates from friends and the sites I'm a fan of.

It would be on topic if the plastic frog was also doing mosaics crafting.I remember the little green fellow from an argumentation course, so I added him. He wasn't the brightest but he sur knew how to jump to conclusions. Duckie, on the other hand, kept flunking it.

From TFS: "The older users had more than 4x the friends each, on average, than the young."

They've also had a lifetime of real life social networking (not the online kind) to boost the level of friends and acquaintances they would like to keep in contact with.

Young people are very cliquey with their behaviour in regards to friends. When I was in school, I could've counted my true friends on my fingers. When I went out into the world and bounced jobs for a couple years, I met many more interesting people that I remained friends with after the jobs had come and gone.

Also, do we really need another article to tell us that the older people in society are less hip to the social network scams?

That's not necesarily true. Besides, that study might be right over there, but here in southamerica is directly the opposite. I don't think nowadays kids are as cliquey, not to mention that those cliques are notably bigger in an environment where you can look for those people from a damn list and pick the people you think are part of your clique.
Older people are just generally less careful about accepting friend requests. That point really makes that article pretty pointless.

You saved me the bother of stating the same thing. All of my friends on Facebook are people I actually know; some I see regularly, others less so. I suspect I still haven't added everyone I used to know and would want to keep up with; I only joined recently.

Who doesn't want to be friends with a rubber ducky. Anyone raised on that nefarious propaganda brain-washing show, 'Sesame Street' knows to sing "Rubber ducky! You're the one! You make bathtime so much fun! Rubber ducky, you're the only one for me!" I mean who wouldn't want to be friends with a rubber ducky? It's much more meaningful a relationship than anyone you knew from High School.

TFA is full of shit- their rubber ducky was probably friended, but put on a restrictive friend list.

I'm friends with a famous turkey (long story), but said turkey is on a restricted friend list that can see barely more than my public info. I guarantee you every kid has a restricted list of one sort or another.

Also, did they bother to track how many people friended it just enough to check it out, and then unfriended it?

I personally have 2 accounts. I use one strictly for games where I will accept any and all takers. I post to lists to increase my numbers and can see from 20 to hundreds of requests per day. That account has no real data.

My other REAL account only has REAL friends and Family. I scrutinize every request and all personal settings are very tight as to only allow friends to see the data. I'd consider myself an 'older' user @ +40. From what I have seen, this is not uncommon.

I'll go you one better - I have a single facebook account with no real information in it at all. I made this account because people were constantly sending me facebook links, and you can't look at them without having an account. More perplexing still is that account, essentially completely inactive from a facebook perspective without posts, pictures, or any meaningful personal data (it lists, for example, the age as 109 because at one time the default birthday was 1/1/1900 and I didn't change it), still g

I've been on Facebook for 9 months now, and haven't gotten a single spam friend request. The only request I've gotten from someone I didn't know was from someone whose blog post I had responded to, and he assumed I was someone he knew since only his friends and family knew about his blog (I found it through a google search). I can only assume that you are using some game or other application that is sharing your info or something.

How about not putting stuff up on social media sites that you wouldn't want posted on a bulletin board at the local laundromat? Why on earth would I post my DOB, address, phone number there for example??

You're absolutely correct in your thinking, but that's what keeps people like us employed. If society were concerned with their personal information, half the security companies in the world wouldn't exist. Take a look at the internet spam reports: http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/?L=en [barracudanetworks.com] If people didn't OPEN that stuff, spammers/phishers wouldn't propagate it.
People are ignorant, therefore I am employed.

In principle, the information is only visible to a pre-defined list of other users, your "friends". The point of the article is that that list is often composed with only its social function in mind, with a disregard for its security function.

Does the article discuss how much info each user leaked? I wouldn't be real surprised if the older users posted less info and were thus less concerned with privacy (It also wouldn't be shocking if they were simply less aware of it).

Does the article discuss how much info each user leaked? I wouldn't be real surprised if the older users posted less info and were thus less concerned with privacy (It also wouldn't be shocking if they were simply less aware of it).

I guess at 45 I qualify as "older" in this context. I don't post personal details, or say things I don't want my business contacts to be aware of. FB serves the same purpose to me as a cocktail party - it's just a simple social function. I don't really care who wants to be my friend (which I view more as a 'live rolodex') - you never know who might be handy to know. I have about 300 friends on FB. My wife, who's a freelance writer and has to network as part of her business, has over 1500. It's just a

That's what I don't get... though I'm pretty open with my DOB and phone number, my address not nearly as much. Then again, I have a *VERY* common name, with a couple other people that match the same name and DOB. My online persona is pretty open actually. Personally, I just ignore/disallow pretty much all apps on facebook.

Why wouldn't you want to make those details handily available to those friends you trust with them? Especially if it means that if you need to change your phone number, many friends will have the new number synched to their phone automatically before you even get around to telling them that the old one is dead.

I'd probably accept anyone who cares enough to "friend" me, whether I know them or not. Mark me in the 43.5%, a guy who once accepted a friend request from "Some Pencils" and a random girl in Arizona (thousands of miles from me) just because she was a girl. What are these people going to find out... my hometown? My college? My favorite tv shows? Who cares? I don't think I'm really stalker material, and iIf my favorite movies are that important to some guy writing a corporate spambot, whatever, he can have it. He can't even find my address or my phone number on facebook, two things I consider more personal, and _those_ you can already find in any phonebook site.

Hell, maybe we're _more_ careful about our personal info since facebook doesn't really have anything on it that we value.

Daer Friend
We rite 2 u as reprazentative of the King Of Pencils who has lately been deposed in horrible sharpening accident may he rest in pease.
After grate searchingz we have found u 2 B long lost relative with business sometimes related to requirement of writing and/or shading in. The King has in receipt of great funds to the amount of 750,000 of American Dollars which he wishes to translate to your country of origin in order to pass on to a selection of HB and HB2 illustrative and artistic pencils whom he holds dear in hiz hart.
As for helping the King (rest his shavings in pease) to transfer this funds to your country of origen we, as many penicls, are authorized to give you a ten porcent of his great funds, for 75,000 US Funds Dollars.
Please do not delay contact immeatedly this pencils or we must find another fine friend and business colleage to do with this business!
Contact immedatily! Send by e-mail.
Your Respect Friend
Some Pencils

I am also seeing that more and more people are calling them promoters and advertisers by adding 1,000 friends on there and don't realize the information they are disclosing.
The biggest example is the Palin email account hacking that most of the answers to security questions was found in her Facebook.

If this trend is true, it points towards our "habituation" with the notion of the lack of privacy in our society. I think that along with the flood of information in our society comes the feeling that "all information should be freely available". People in general are becoming de-sensitized to this trend more and more, and expect more information about themselves to be available publicly. Not even just online - take a popular show like CSI. I think it's just sort of assumed that everyone is leaving this massive digital fingerprint behind them.

Plastic Frog? Rubber Duck!? Cat?!?! What is this world coming to??? Humanity is doomed!

Im going to have to side with B3ttik on this one... most people dont give a shit. This the nature of social networking, and to be frank I think Facebook wants it that way. The more information that is exposed to the masses the more they can use for their massive data mining schemes. Its just one huge advertising machine.

I think what's going on is older and younger people are using different definitions of "friend" on Facebook. Older people are adding everybody because their definition is "friend or person to play with on the internet". Younger people are using the definition, "friend or potential sex partner". And as soon as they figure out you're not one or the other, you're off their list.
Also, most of the teens I know have thousands of people on their lists while most of the adults I know have hundreds. I think this s

I just set up a group for "limited" access, so if someone friend requests me and I don't feel that I trust them I add them to the limited group right away (upon accepting them) and then they can only see a handful of things. If they turn out to be real people and I become friends with them outside of facebook, at a later point I could always remove them from the limited access group and they'll see what my normal friends see.

So yea, maybe I accepted more friend requests than the average kid (I consider mys

I have tons of random friends. Why? Because I use Facebook as a gaming site, rather than a friends site. The more 'friends' I have, the more powerful I am in the games. (Which is stupid, but that's the way they are written.) So I've got like 1000 'friends' on facebook about 10 in real life, plus family. Most of my 'friends' on facebook are the same way.

I don't post things on there that I don't want random strangers to see anyhow, so it's no big deal.

Same here I have a few hundred friends I don't know because I play a lot of games. I could set up security for them but I don't have anything on my Facebook account that a stranger couldn't see. You don't know me but want to look at pictures of me wakeboarding, hiking or whatever photos I post? Have at it.

How does he know that all that "personal info" is real? I don't do "social networking" but it seems to me some might find it amusing to create an account with plausible but fake "personal info" and then "friend" away.

I must be in the minority. If I don't know a person I won't add them as a friend. Heck I've gone through my friend's list and purged out people I don't talk to or in other instances strongly dislike from way back in high school. I also don't play Mobwars or Farmville which is just a needless waste of time. I avoid them because I would become engrossed in it.

Welcome to our minority. My personal filter is that if I wouldn't feel comfortable approaching them randomly to strike up a conversation then they shouldn't be on my list. There's lots of people from high school I denied because I didn't talk to them then, what's changed? Just because we knew 'of' each other it doesn't mean we need to put on a fake smile and pretend we were all buddy buddy.

The article seems lost entirely in its own little world and clueless whats going on. Facebook IS farmville, vampire wars, pet society, arena, etc. People join those groups, spam them for invites, and get invites in return to build up their game networks. I know one actual person in my list that doesnt do this, shes in high school and actually uses facebook to talk to her friends and complain about homework. Weirdo.

Now to discuss that people who play facebook shouldn't put too much personal information o

My friends and I conducted a sort of experiment a while back. We created an online Facebook identity that was completely over the top - the goal was for him to be a stereotypical college burn-out.

None of the photos we tag of him reveal his face - we find pictures of normal college activities (parties, football games, etc.) and tag a guy who's turned the wrong way, standing in the distance, or whatever. There are about 100 of these photos and none of them are of the same person.

It's scary, really. Imagine how easy it would be for a predator to create an online persona that is NORMAL? When this guy, who's status is regularly updated with lines such as "ayyy yo cause when i git crunk i like to toke...yaa digg??/? ahhaahaahh", is able to have even one successful conversation.

Heh I bet that fictional persona is far more interesting than me (or the average slashdotter I guess:P ) - I'm NOT able to get phone numbers or get to add "gurls":P

Hmm... I wonder if there’s a way to calculate the optimum approach vector, based on which of someone’s friends are likely to add you as a friend off-the-bat, which of them are likely to add you once you have a few friends in common, and how many friends in common you’ll need to have before you have a reasonable expectation of success when you attempt to friend the target?